Men, women, children, and dogs gorged to repletion, nor was there one person, even among the chance visitors and stray hunters from other tribes, who failed to receive some token of the bridegroom's largess.

She looked towards her bridegroom's land, the man against whom she knew nothing, of whom she had heard nothing but good; she saw marriage advancing upon her all too rapidly, and there was such a baffled and resentful sadness in her face, and such an obstinate rejection of her fate, that Cadfael marvelled no one else felt her burning outrage, and turned in alarm to find the source of this intense disquiet.

But first he must rewrite Hopkins's poem, to show that the five nuns drowned in the shipwreck acted cowardly in some final opéra bouffe, and that Hopkins then rewrote their deaths as "an almost erotic apprehension of the spiritual bridegroom's masterful descent on his virginal supplicant," so that "Christ's death-dealing becomes one of Hopkins's most powerful versions of his recurrent fantasy of simultaneous rape and redemption."